Search engines are utilized to maximize the likelihood of locating relevant information amongst an abundance of data. For instance, search engines are often employed over the World Wide Web (a.k.a. web) to facilitate locating and accessing websites of interest as a function of a search query comprising one or more keywords and operators. Upon receipt of a query, the search engine retrieves a list of websites that match the query, generates a snippet of text associated with the websites, and displays the websites and text, typically ranked based on relevance. The user can thereafter scroll through a plurality of returned websites in an attempt to identify information of interest. However, this can be an extremely time-consuming and frustrating process since search engines can return a substantial amount of content that often is irrelevant to a user's intent.
One way to address the substantial amount of content returned by search engines is to restrict search to a set of relevant websites, which can be accomplished in a variety of ways including site search and custom search engines (CSE). Site search is typically realized using custom search engines by restricting web search results to one or more sites. This behavior is often harnessed by using a “site” query operator on a search engine. For example, the query “flash site:abc.com” returns web pages from “abc.com” that match the query term “flash.” Further, some custom search engines permit users to manually specify a set of relevant websites and filter result sets to return only pages from these sites, and also allow for fixed keywords to be added to query terms before a search is issued.